[zestyping]

It's weird to me that almost all posting/commenting platforms are about the same. You get a series of small boxes with text in them and a small box to type into, usually too small to fit more than a couple of sentences, perhaps a button to promote, a button to reshare, and that's it. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Medium, Disqus... all the same.

We've explored so little of the design space.

If I had to hazard in extrapolating from only a few data points, it seems that shame-storming behaviour correlates with (a) how easily you can reshare without thinking and (b) how easily you can reshare without context.

It would be fun to brainstorm all the possibilities for how we could be communicating online differently. Here are a few stupid ideas I've thought of; I'm sure there are millions more and I'd love to hear yours:

* You have to wait at least 30 seconds before you can hit the reply or reshare button.

* Short or low-information comments are discouraged; if your comment is short or an exact duplicate of something previously written (e.g. a common insult), it's blocked or you have to wait longer before posting it.

* You must listen to your comment read back to you aloud before you can post it.

* Even when reshared, your comment is always presented together with, and close to, the content of the original source article so it's hard to ignore the source.

* You have to correctly answer a simple question about the article before posting a comment on it. A Norwegian newspaper tried this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14883842).

* After you've gone back and forth a couple of times with the same person, the only option presented to you is to make a voice call directly to that person. You can't just type text at them any more.

* Variant: after a thread gets long enough, you can't type text any more. You must record yourself speaking.

* Every comment must be approved by its parent. (If you never approve replies, then your threads aren't interesting to read, and maybe you get a reputation for never approving, so no one will bother to reply to you.)

[gambler]

About a decade ago I've been thinking about how to design a good discussion platform, and the ideas I came up with have a lot of similarities with what you posted. I think that encouraging long-form communication where quickness of replies is not an inherent advantage and where there are costs to posting (as opposed to not posting) would be great for improving communication quality.

I also think that visual design cues matter much more than people think. Simply having large text fields to type in and clean design where large posts are readable really changes the tone of dicussions. I've seen this on many websites.

Another, newer, idea I have is that there should be some cost to finding/reading new content. It's probably not what you imagined right now. Here is an example. Let's say you have a popular YouTube video when someone plays Overwatch. Instead of the garbled toxic mess we have right now, comments could be split into different tabs/topic. There could be one tab where people discuss the strategy of the player, while in another tab people could discuss balance of the game as a whole. The "cost" of reading comments would be reading the titles of all tabs and clicking on one. It's not much, but I am 99% sure it would do miracles for decreasing toxicity.

People behave much better when they feel they are interacting in a social "space" with a defined (if open) group of other people. Information overflow destroys this feeling in an instant, no matter what other social features you add.

[NathanKP]

> We've explored so little of the design space.

The design space that we are willing to explore is limited by the fundamental evolutionary drive of social media platforms to hold your attention as long as possible by feeding you little hits of dopamine for minimal effort. Social media platforms thrive on size and activity and neither can be established by raising the bar, only by lowering it to new depths.

[apatters]

On the other hand, Mastodon doesn't have this drive. Facebook, Twitter et al are designed to be addictive because higher engagement translates to higher ad revenue. But Mastodon is ad free and the cost of operating the service is defrayed over thousands of inexpensive, federated instances, so there's less pressure to generate revenue of any kind.

Unfortunately Mastodon chose to clone Twitter's design and the Tweetdeck UI, so the tendency toward short-form, low information comments is carried over from Twitter. I too believe that these design patterns encourage toxic behavior. A simple experiment for any short-form social platform would be to lift any post character limit, make longer posts more readable, and prioritize longer comments in the ranking algorithm, and see what influence that has on the toxicity of the overall experience.

I mean if ten thousand people have responded to something, I would really rather read a few responses where someone made the effort to type out a few hundred words and what they wrote became popular. This doesn't guarantee it will be sane, cogent, etc. but it's better than staring at a wall of one line haters and trolls, which Twitter harassment victims always reference as one of the most traumatic parts of the experience.

[zestyping]

I think (at least a few) people are starting to realize that this is what's happening. There may be a window of opportunity opening up to try new and different things. I suspect there are a fair number of folks who are looking for alternatives to Facebook/Twitter/etc. and would be intrigued by novelty.

Bumble is an example of a platform that was all about changing the rules of engagement, and it seems to be doing all right so far. Perhaps there's hope?

[hnuser1234]

It's doing alright as in not failing, but remains to be seen if any of their paradigms measurably improve anything.

[nyolfen]

this is the first time i’ve heard someone mention bumble in about two years

[cabalamat]

> Social media platforms thrive on size

Yes. This means federated social networks might long-term have the edge, since someone can launch a new one, and by being part of the federation it automatically starts with lots of users.

[petra]

We've seen similar limited designs in forum systems. And they aren't necessary driven by the social media economics.

So why are they so similar?

[woolvalley]

I like your list of ideas, but I just want to bring up one point:

Sometimes the only way to get an insight to the thought processes of the busy & insightful people of the world is through something like twitter, because they don't have time for anything else. Certain subcultures of twitter can be fairly positive despite the lack of moderation tools because the community is small and not a current political hot potato.

That is something I wouldn't want to lose.

[tivert]

> * You have to wait at least 30 seconds before you can hit the reply or reshare button.

I think there should be more and longer delays:

* a one minute delay before you can enter text into the reply box.

* a half-hour (or longer) delay before any comment/post/reply goes online. During that time you're free to edit or delete (but there must be at least a 5 minute delay after your last edit).

The idea is try to let any initial impulse of outrage pass before anything can be said, to force people to put more time into what they say, and lower velocity to keep things from snowballing out of control.

[randallsquared]

The majority of these suggestions raise the level of effort to make (and display) posts and comments. As someone who currently rarely blogs or tweets, I'd prefer something that lowered the effort to make good posts. I freely admit that I have no obviously good ideas for that at the moment.

One of these suggestions, though:

> Even when reshared, your comment is always presented together with, and close to, the content of the original source article so it's hard to ignore the source.

...is interesting because the most prominent example of that workflow is Tumblr, which is widely expected to be near death. I like the idea in principle, but I notice that when I share an image or post from Tumblr with someone I am very likely to do it by sharing a screenshot, precisely to avoid having the bit I'm calling attention to overshadowed by its context...

[gred]

> Every comment must be approved by its parent.

Design twist: every comment must be approved by the commenter's parent -- father or mother.

[zestyping]

Hahahaha! >_<

[Izkata]

> Short or low-information comments are discouraged; if your comment is short or an exact duplicate of something previously written (e.g. a common insult), it's blocked or you have to wait longer before posting it.

I am for this one in particular, if for no other reason than to see more Shakespearean insults due to people being forced to get creative.

[dejawu]

> Short or low-information comments are discouraged; if your comment is short or an exact duplicate of something previously written (e.g. a common insult), it's blocked or you have to wait longer before posting it.

4chan tried this based on a script called Robot9000 (by Randall Munroe). Not to imply causation (since there are a ton of cultural factors as well), but that board is now known as the breeding ground of the incel and redpill movements.

I do think the R9K script itself is a good idea though.

[cabalamat]

> Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Medium, Disqus... all the same.

Of the ones I've used I like Reddit the most. It allows long posts, uses Markdown, and is threaded.

> We've explored so little of the design space.

I've recently started writing a federated blogging platform which will use the ActivityPub protocol. One nice advantage of federated platforms, is they can share each others' messages meaning it's easier for them to get lots of users (you can piggyback on the rest of the federation), so there can be more experiments on doing things different ways.

> You have to wait at least 30 seconds before you can hit the reply or reshare button.

Or the message isn't sent until a cooling down period.

> Short or low-information comments are discouraged; if your comment is short or an exact duplicate of something previously written (e.g. a common insult), it's blocked or you have to wait longer before posting it.

Sometimes a post can be short because a short post is all that is needed. E.g someone might ask me a question that the answer might simply be "yes". I would find it annoying to have to artificially pad the length.

But longer posts should always be possible and the user interface shouldn't discourage them.

> You must listen to your comment read back to you aloud before you can post it.

That's an interesting one. The way I'm going is posts will be edited in Markdown and will then appear as marked-up text.

> Even when reshared, your comment is always presented together with, and close to, the content of the original source article so it's hard to ignore the source.

What I call the "context" of a post is the post its a reply to and that post's context. This could all be stored in a data-structure (such as JSON) when the post is transferred across the network, so the context would always be there. Also the id of a post could be a hash of its contents, making it tamper-evident.

[PavlovsCat]

> Sometimes a post can be short because a short post is all that is needed. E.g someone might ask me a question that the answer might simply be "yes". I would find it annoying to have to artificially pad the length.

> But longer posts should always be possible and the user interface shouldn't discourage them.

Yeah! For example, this is a node with two subnodes, one of which has a title and description and everything, the other just a body, so it gets a little permalink thingy:

https://i.imgur.com/tESzN5O.png

These are posts in a CMS and not comments, but the principle is the same. Just don't display gigantic things inline by default and there is no reason for big and small posts can't coexist.

[leereeves]

Reddit is no better.

The majority of posts on /r/popular are shaming, harassment, mocking, etc. Whole subs are devoted to that.

[cabalamat]

This depends entirely on what subreddits you read.

[leereeves]

Of course. That's true anywhere. I'm just pointing out that even when a platform allows people to write long essays, what most people really want to do is make fun of other people.

[philsnow]

> You must listen to your comment read back to you aloud before you can post it.

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/youtube-adds-read-comment-alo...

[zestyping]

Ha! I think I thought of this independently from Randall Munroe, but who knows.

Anyway, we should do this experiment, and others! What's to lose?